Hooking Up's Downside

The New York Times Sunday Styles section led recently with 170-inch story that begins with the news that some female university students are pursuing no-emotional-strings-required sex with men.

No surprise here. This practice for students and non-students is accepted uncritically in precincts wide and far these days. And that is unfortunate because the unchallenged notion that hooking up is a benign practice misleads some young women.

My experience with women and this subject mostly concerns psychological factors. For some, repeatedly hooking up creates a psychological pattern that is hard to escape when at some future date a woman decides that she wants to establish a “real” and monogamous relationship with a man. If a person’s experience is mostly avoiding and sometimes denying romantic feelings, it can be difficult to change gears.

For some, hooking up for sex is actually done with the privately cherished goal of securing a meaningful emotional relationship with a man. Skipping straight to sex with the hope of circling back later to find emotional intimacy is very hard on self-esteem. Few are able to make the ends of that circle meet, yet many continue to try.

For some women, the process of hooking up means a good deal of effort has to be expended in suppressing the display of any feelings that might be interpreted as in any way “serious.” Over time this suppression takes on a life of its own, blocking honest communication and promoting superficiality

A theme in the interviews that the author of the article conducted with students who use a hooking up strategy for sex, is that they do not have time for serious relationships. In one report, a student calculates that a serious relationship would be, in terms of time, the equivalent of taking another four-hour class. Others plan to relentlessly devote themselves to their careers until they are 30 and then think about developing a romantic relationship with someone. One college student describes her classmates as working hard to separate sex from emotion, because they believed that getting too close to someone would interfere with their work.

Why is it that many women feel that in order to be high achieving they have to cut themselves off from intimacy, connection and love from men? All along the way, these women still long to be known but tell themselves that they can’t simultaneously be in an emotionally reciprocal relationship and also excel.

Yet for many women, the feelings that produce emotional intimacy can’t be turned off and on like a switch. Emotional intimacy is not something acquired off the shelf. Young women deserve to hear public challenges to the idea that there is no down side to sex without emotional intimacy.

Of course, time is valuable. But most will discover that it is as valuable at age 30 as it is at 25 or 20. The challenge is to find balance and for most people that means making a place on the scales for emotional intimacy.

There is also the difficult issue of what a woman believes she deserves. If emotional intimacy was not a part of a girl’s early years, if all the emphasis is on perfection or achievement, if there is no audience in a family to hear a girl’s doubts, the outcome can be an adult who is not comfortable with emotional intimacy herself. In this situation, the argument that there is no time for a serious relationship may camouflage deeper issues.

Jill Weber isn't telling young men to have deep intimate relationships in their 20s, this is a directive reserved for women. It's okay for men to have sexual relationships that don't lead to intimate commitments but not okay for women.

This endless drumbeat of women to behave in a certain approved way is ridiculous. Maybe some women have determined they cannot be successful high-achievers and then automatically turn off the switch at 5PM and become vulnerable sweetie-pies who don't mind cleaning up behind a man. These so-called experts aren't bothering to ask these young women what the challenges are. It's just so much easier to point a finger and proclaim these young women are leading their lives incorrectly. These young women are probably doing what they do for a really good reason.

There have been several articles popping up on this issue lately, and I can't seem to understand why it is an issue in the first place. There are plenty of men in their 20s that are having non-commital relationships, yet why are we so surprised by women following suit? I mean afterall, considering women are closer than ever to have gender equality, why is it so shocking to follow in the same footsteps of their male counterparts? Note that I am not generalizing here. There are plenty of young men that indeed are in long-term committed relationships just as there are as many young women in similar situations.

I think we are missing the poing that with gender equality, there is a natural occuring shift that will bring both genders on equal footing. While a decade ago most women's goals use to be centered on being in a committed relationship in their 20s, now some a shifting towards non-committed relationships, and while most men wanted to be CEOs with widely successful careers, now some want to be stay at home dads. This is a gradual societal shift that aims to take gender out of the equation while these types of articles simply serve to take us one step back. A more relevant question would be why are university students shying away from intimate relationships in order to advance in their careers, and how can we go about solving the issue.

I live in the UK and can see parallels to what you have written, in that many women seem to be focussed on careers to the exclusion of relating to men at all as people. Perhaps women are responding to feeling objectified by objectifying men in return? Or the extreme business and perfectionism is a psychological defence, a means of successfully avoiding intimacy?

I guess I'm just paraphrasing what you have written, but thought I would post a comment!

I think there are two generalizations in any article about women and sex. One is eloquently explained in the comments above about the stereotype women date for marriage and cannot have meaningless sex and men date for sex and have to be coherence in to marriage.

Secondly, we assume that all women who "hook up" are doing so to focus on their careers. I don't see this trend at all. Hooking up is something that adults are doing in all age groups and it's quite common. In fact, if you don't live this type of lifestyle...you won't have as many dates as the hooking up people do...at least in NYC (my hood). I just find it funny that "dating" now is hooking up and you can't even talk to a man with out him assuming you will have causal sex with him. That's it. How monotonous.